leave me alone, but just don't leave me here
by alicinna
Summary: B/B; AU from the end of 5.16, 'The Parts in the Sum of the Whole'; Brennan says yes and waits for it to end.


**leave me alone, but just don't leave me here **/_ brennan says yes and waits for it to end_

booth/brennan; AU from 5.16 'The Parts in the Sum of the Whole'

_..._

"You said it yourself, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome."

"So, lets go for a different outcome!"

She's staring into his eyes and she thinks he might start crying. She doesn't know how she feels, she can't put a word to the heavy pressure in her chest, the dryness in her throat. He clutches her arms like he'll never let go.

"Okay," she says, and she has to repeat herself, because she was too quiet. "Okay."

"Okay?" He's looking into her eyes, like he's looking for answers.

"Let's... try." She swallows around the lump in her throat. "I want to … I want to try."

There's another moment of him looking at her and she wants to look down but she forces herself not too. Then he's smiling and kissing her and she kisses back, clinging to his shoulders, the shape of his perfect acromion pressing into her palms. He seems giddy. She thinks she might be feeling relief.

…

They go back to her apartment, because it's closer, but they stop for food on the way. In the car Booth reaches for her hand as he drives, and in the take-out place he keeps an arm around her waist, pulling her close to him. He looks at her with wide, sparkling eyes and she counts the bones of his fingers as he entwines their hands together. She's trying so hard to relax into his casual touches.

At her apartment, she goes through to the kitchen with the food, starting to pull plates from the cupboards. She can hear him locking the door, and then he stands behind her, placing his hands on her hips and kissing her neck. They are so domestic already.

He stands behind her, tugging her gently backwards so she leans against him. He slides his hands from her hips to her stomach. She turns in his arms and kisses him forcefully, losing herself in the sensations. His hands are on her waist again, fingers sliding under her shirt. Not for the first time she wishes she could turn off her brain, but there are too many thoughts rushing around her head. She pulls away, taking his hands and leading him to the bedroom.

…

They're naked and she's lying beneath him and it's nice – more than nice, of course, because Booth is pleasingly attractive and an excellent kisser and it's been some time since she has had sexual intercourse, so it is frustrating and unexplainable that she can't seem to get wet for him. She wants too, wants to show him how much she wants him. She growls in frustration.

He kisses her and murmurs in her ear, "it's all right, baby," and he's sliding downwards, kissing the hollow between her breasts and her navel. "I'm nervous too," he whispers to her, before kissing her thigh.

She turns the word over in her mind as he runs his tongue across the crease of her inner thigh. Nervousness, perhaps that's all it is, this strange feeling that is leaving her so unsettled. She runs a hand through his hair as his mouth presses closer, his tongue starting to draw her out of herself. Arousal starts to curl through her stomach and settle lower: she moans and her body finally seems to be catching up with this reality.

She pulls him away and upwards, and sits up long enough to pull a condom from her beside cabinet. He's slow and tender as he pushes into her, and she concentrates on the feel of his spine beneath her fingertips, the thrust of his pelvic bone against hers, the round corners of his jaw where she presses short kisses between gasps.

…

Later, after they have pulled themselves out of bed and eaten, and then fallen back into bed, she lies awake and worries. Sex is something she has always believed herself to be good at, yet thinking back, she is amazed at how passive she was with Booth. Not that he complained. Maybe it was what he liked? She wishes she could just ask him, but he's always so ... shocked when she talks about sex. She'll do better next time, she promises herself, turning to look at his profile in the moonlight. He looks perfectly at home in her bed, lying on his stomach, his mouth slightly open, one arm thrown across her stomach.

She's still awake, watching Booth, as the sky starts lightning. Booth has rolled onto his back, and she's lying next to him, curled up against him. It's good and she feels safe. She's tired, so it's easier to just concentrate on the moment. Her room is starting to glow in the dawn light, and she lets herself feel safe and warm.

_Enjoy it while it lasts_, perks a voice in her head. _Because it won't last._

Irrationally she shuts her eyes against the voice. It works. She drifts to sleep.

…

She feels selfish and weak, but she couldn't say no and watch him walk (or drive) away. She's not strong enough, though she's had a lifetime of practise. He deserves more and better than her, and one day he'll realise that. She should tell him now, make up neat, tidy reasons why she isn't right for him. But she's being selfish, so she clings to him and tries to be enough.

She remembers what makes him frown and what makes him clench his teeth or fists. She creates a mental list of topics they can talk about, so she won't accidentally annoy him. She watches sports with him and doesn't comment. She goes with him and Parker to mass on Sunday and sits quietly, nodding at the other parishioners and sharing a hymn book with him. She tries not to be weird, or creepy, or wrong. She wants to stretch out this time, before the inevitable end, she wants as much time with him as she can get, she wants to pull it around her and call it home, even if half of her mind is already planning ahead for the end.

(She'll go on a dig, she thinks, six - or seven or twelve - months somewhere remote and harsh concentrating on bones and death. Perhaps with enough time and space they'll be able to work together in some way, though it can't ever be the same of course.)

...

They have Parker this weekend, so on Friday night she creeps out of bed after Booth has gone to sleep and pulls her clothes back on, smoothing out the wrinkles with quick nervous hands.

She curls on his sofa with her laptop, wrapped in a blanket. She has to finish this chapter by Monday – she's spent too much time with Booth lately and she knows that she won't have any time when Parker is here.

She's typing away furiously when Booth suddenly sits down beside her. She jumps.

"Booth!"

"Hey," he grins, his eyes still sleepy. "Working?"

"I was just – I was working on my book." Slowly, she closes her laptop, then kisses him. "Morning."

"Do you need to work today? I can take Parker out, give you some quiet - "

"No! No. It's fine. I want to see Parker. We were going to have a picnic, I should start making – do you want pancakes?" She stands and heads over to the kitchen. He stands and follows her with his longer strides, catching her around the waist with one arm.

"It's okay if you need to work, Bones. You're a workaholic, I already knew that, remember? We've spent a lot of time together, lately, so if you need - "

"Do you want me to stay home? If you want to spend time with Parker, you don't have to - "

"No, I want you there, Temperance, of course I do - "

"You were always dragging me away from my work, Booth, and now you _want_ me to work. I don't understand, what do you want?"

They paused in their argument and Brennan can't even figure out how this started. There is a sudden weight in her stomach and her throat is dry. At some point he took his arm away from her waist and stepped back. She tightens her hands into fists. She won't cry.

"We don't always have to do what I want to do. You always - " he pauses, closes his eyes for a long moment. "We can do something you want to do."

"Parker's coming this weekend," she replies. "We should take him to things he will enjoy, and you know what those are."

"Yeah, but we could go to - I don't know. You can pick something for us to do. A museum, or something."

She stares at him. There are things she might take a ten year old boy too, workshops at the Jeffersonian, things she would have loved to do as a child.

_But Booth would be bored. And normal children don't like things like that._

"I don't know what he would like," she says instead.

Booth runs a hand over his face and she bites on her lip, trying to summon up the words to mend this.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs. When he doesn't reply, she tries again. "I like spending time with you and Parker. I didn't consider that the two of you might want to spend some time alone. You can tell me if you do. I don't want to … impose."

Booth keeps staring at her and she can't hold his gaze.

Finally he reaches out, takes her hand speaks softly. "I want you there, Bones, you know I do."

"Okay," she says smiling weakly. "Then I'll come."

…

She's angry with him some days. She wants to ask someone if that is normal or okay. He changed everything, turned her upside down and inside out. After that night, that kiss, it had to change, and either way it seemed to spell the end of their relationship.

(She says no: he's heart broken – heart crushed – he can't work with her any more, can't look at her because she's hurt him, hurt him badly, and all the explanation she could give him about brain chemistry and anthropology wouldn't help. He leaves.)

(Or she says yes: he's happy, and they stay together, for a month, three months, six, until the day his brain chemistry changes, until she does something to snap him out of the chemically induced euphoria he'll call love and then he leaves.)

She's walking on a tightrope so thin it's barely there, but she mastered the high wire and she's done this before, that thin line of "be yourself" and "don't be weird." It makes it hard to breathe when she's near him sometimes, but she doesn't mind, most of the time.

She's trying to make him happy, to be what he wants, what he needs. It's been a long time since Brennan felt like she was reaching beyond her abilities, but this does it. It's selfish of her, but she wants to try, to try to be better, for him.

She knows it will end, because she can't walk that tightrope forever. She's used to people leaving, people sending her away like she doesn't matter, like she's nothing, inconsequential and forgettable. (She's spent her adult life making herself unforgettable.) Parents, brothers, foster families, all the people she wasn't good enough for, all the people who kindly told her _you don't seem happy here_ and _this is for the best, _or the unkind ones who told her _you're a weird kid, _and _we aren't happy_. Or everyone who simply said _you're too old, too quiet, too creepy, we don't understand you and we don't want to._

Booth called her creepy once.

He knows what she's doing, and he doesn't like it. Doesn't like the careful conversations that she thinks up in advance, doesn't like the way they do the things he likes (watch sports, go bowling, eat pie at the dinner.) He tells her, _don't change, be yourself, I love you Bones, you, just the way you are,_ and she believes him, but love is just chemicals, it's transitory, it fades away and she wants him to understand her, to _like_ her, more than she needs him to love her.

…

Her body begins to rush away from her, her muscles drawing taut, tension stretching out through the length of her spine and further than her body. She draws a sharp breath in through her nose as her lips press together and curl in towards each other. She presses her jaw bone upwards sharply as her toes curl and her body spasms. She comes with the first letter of his name pressed thin and trapped between her lips.

Nathan presses his forehead to her clavicle. He didn't notice her holding another man's name inside her breath.

...

He wants her to know his heart, but she doesn't know what that means. The heart is flesh: muscle and blood. It's not what she knows.

She thinks about the words.

The word _heart_ can mean the organ, but also it can mean _core_ or _centre._

For her, the core of the human body is not the heart, but the skeletal structure. She knows Booth's skeleton, she'd knows it better than she knows any living person's, and better than many dead ones.

She knows the damage to his vertebrate and the arch of his spine as she runs her hand down his back. She know the fractures in his feet, that they ache on cold days. She knows the feel of his hand upon her back, the weight of phalanges pressing her forward, the solidness of his shoulder blades beneath her cheek; the remodelled hole in his ribs, where he took a bullet meant for her and fault though his sternum where they cracked it open after that to get at his heart (his real heart.) The crack in his skull where they went into his brain, where the words from her story seeped into his dream.

...

Booth is knocking on her door and she isn't surprised. She knows he does this. They spend so many nights together (always at his) that when they spend a night apart he arrives in the early morning, with coffee and lazy kisses.

She throws on a robe and sits on the bed listening to the shower running.

She wants to tell him that she has known Nathan a long time. They were grad students together in India and all her memories of him are tied in fermented cannabis and the kind of heat that leeches into the bone; with quick, semi-silent sex in the middle of the day because everyone is having lunch and the tents are empty.

She wants to tell him that she never lied to him, that he always knew how she felt about monogamy, that she's had a sexual relationship with Nathan for longer than she's known Booth.

She wants to tell him it's nothing, it doesn't mean anything, but that would be a lie, because sex with Nathan means everything. She wants Booth to stay anyway. She wants him to want to understand her, to understand why she did this.

...

She doesn't watch him walk away and she doesn't watch him drive off. All the nervous energy that has been building for the past six months collapses in on itself, on her, so she sits on the sofa and curls her fingers into a cushion.

It would never have lasted, she tells herself with certainty. It's better to end it now, quickly and (almost) painlessly. She tries to ignore the ache settling in her chest. She's vaguely aware that Nathan has left, that the day is dragging on. She showers and dresses slowly, blinking at herself in the bathroom mirror.

(People sometimes say _I didn't recognise myself anymore, _but she stares her her own face unflinchingly.)

When she leaves for work she automatically grabs the cup of coffee on the counter. She's half way to her car before she realises that it's gone cold.

...

She's making plans to leave when Booth walks in.

There's a dig in north Pakistan that she has been repeatedly invited to. She's organising flights on her computer, her luggage packed and ready to go.

"I think we should have a fight," he says by way of opening the conversation. He stops looks at her bags and then at her. She sees him take a shaky breath. "A real, full on, screaming fight," he continues. "And then we can have incredible make-up sex, and then we can talk about this."

She looks back at her computer screen. "I don't want to fight with you."

"Okay, we can skip straight to the make-up sex, if you'd prefer." He leans over her desk and smiles widely, his fingers spread across the work surface.

"No," she says bluntly.

He straightens. "Is this your answer?" He gestures at her bags. "This is how you're going to solve our problems?"

She just shakes her head. "I meant it Booth, I'm not fighting with you."

"Well, you should. It's tricky having an argument with yourself, but I'm not above giving it a try."

She ignores him. He stares at her for a moment and then strides across the room.

"Okay. Fine. I'm pissed off. I pissed that you slept with someone else, and don't tell me that you didn't 'sleep'," she can picture his angry air quotes, "because you know damn well what I'm talking about.

And I'm really pissed off that you won't talk to me. I don't mean just now, I mean before as well. I don't know what the hell's been going on with you and it pisses me off that you won't talk about it. I've tried to be patient and understanding and wait for you to be ready for this, but apparently that hasn't worked, so fuck that.

And I'm really, really fucking pissed at how you've been acting, and that nothing I say ever seems to get through to you. _I love you._" He's back at her desk, looking down at her with dark, angry eyes. "I love you, but right now I really, really don't like you very much."

He pauses and she knows he's waiting for her to reply. She bites her lip, swallows against the lump in her throat and shakes her head.

"Bones," he starts, then, "Temperance. Please, god, say something. Anything. Shout, or swear, or slap me. Just - anything."

"I'm going to Pakistan," she tells him calmly. "For six months, at least. Longer, if they want me. It's - " she pauses. "It's better. This is better. I'll come back and then maybe, maybe we can - " she shakes her head. When did she become so emotional? "I want to be able to work with you again. We just need - space. Time, I guess."

"I don't think space and time is going to cut it, Bones," he tells her seriously.

"Are you saying we can't work together anymore?" She hates the tremor in her voice, but she can't suppress it.

"Yeah, Bones, that's what I'm saying. If this is over, then it's really, really over." His voice is deadly serious. The ache in her chest in unmanageable, spilling over. She takes a deep breath and tries to dispel it. She doesn't know how she feels, mostly, but there's anger along side it, recognisable and hot. It ripples across her skin, her neck and cheeks flushing. She clenches her hands and lets it take her over.

"I hate you," she spits, standing up. "I _hate you_." His face drops and he takes a step away - fear? Shock? She's both grateful for and frustrated by the desk separating them. "You changed this, you changed us and now you are going to just _leave._"

"Hey, you're the one who slept with someone else!" He snaps back. "You can't do that and then make it all about _me_ abandoning _you._ That isn't fair."

"None of this is _fair,_ Booth, none of it. I've tried, I've tried so hard, Booth but I can't get it right!"

"Get _what_ right?" He shakes her head. "God Bones, whatever the hell it is you've been trying to do, please clue me in here."

"I wanted it to work, I wanted you to like me - " she cringes at the desperation in her voice and breaks off, turning away.

"Like you? I love you Bones, you know that."

"Chemicals," she muttered at the wall.

"No, no, it's more than that." He steps around the desk, rubbing his hands from her shoulders to her elbows.

"Not to me, Booth. I know that you love me, but it won't last. One day you'll wake up and it'll be gone and then what?"

"So you've been - everything you've been doing has been - what? Trying to get me to like you?" He frowns. "Look at me Bones."

She turns reluctantly, keeping a careful distance between them. "I knew it wouldn't last. We're not - I'm not - " she takes a breath. "We don't have much in common. Our values and interests don't match. Once the initial ... feelings wear off, it's natural for the relationship to end. I wanted to make it last as long as I could, and I hoped that, maybe, we could work together, if I gave you some time, afterwards."

"And space," Booth adds, eyeing her bags. He sighs, his hands coming back up to rest on her shoulders. "Hey," he caught her gaze with his own. "I do like you Bones."

"You said - "

"I know what I said, but I was just angry. You're smart and funny and kind. You're passionate about your work. You love my kid," he adds, smiling gently. "I do like you. I've worried too, you know. I'm kind of a slob, and I can't keep up with you intellectually, and I know you think sports are dumb and I do love my sports, Bones. So I worry that maybe you won't like me very much either."

She has to smile at that. "None of that matters to me, Booth. I like those things about you."

He looks confident, but she thinks she can see a hint of relief in his eyes. "And whatever it is you think I won't like about you? Well, you've got to give me a chance to see those things, Bones. And you have to have faith that I'll like those things about you too."

She steps closer, letting his hands drift from her shoulders until he has his arms wrapped tight around her. "I'm not good with faith," she confesses. "But can try."

"I wouldn't ask for more."

She rests her head against his chest, listening to his heartbeat. "Do we get to have the make-up sex now?" He laughs and it vibrates along his ribcage.

"You're damn straight we do, Bones."

...

They lie across her sofa, their clothes scattered from the doorway to the coffee table.

"I'm not leaving you, Bones."

She has a sudden image of him, stretched out in the sand, bones bleached in the sun.

"All we leave are bones," she tells him. She pressed her head against his shoulder, feeling the roundness of his joint beneath the back of her skull.

Booth pauses, catching up. "I'm not going to leave you," he tries again.

"You can't promise that," she tells him stubbornly. "Any number of things could happen that would cause you to leave me in some way."

"I can promise to try," he assures her.

She turns her head to look him solemnly in the eyes. "I can accept that," she tells him, and leans up to press a kiss to his lips.


End file.
